


Illustrations

by TaleWorthTelling



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Body Paint, F/M, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Self-Acceptance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-22
Updated: 2015-10-22
Packaged: 2018-04-27 15:38:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5054341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TaleWorthTelling/pseuds/TaleWorthTelling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha doesn't have tattoos. They're too distinct, too recognizable. She could hide them, but it's a pain. Even so, there are stories she would tell.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Illustrations

Natasha tells stories. They are long and winding, short and hasty, soft and hazy, bloody and booming, and sometimes quiet and sad. They are snapshots of many lives lived, many lives manufactured and lacquered to perfection. They have only one fact in common.

They are all incomplete. Some she doesn't know the endings to, others she keeps tucked away, too painful to the touch or too personal for the light of day. Sometimes she just flits between stories for no reason. Whatever the case, Steve never hears the end of a single one.

She talks, and he paints her, but his canvas is her body.

He listens silently, never interjecting; his responses are limited to the way his hands trace patterns and soothe across her body in between strokes of the brush he draws down her skin. When her voice becomes soft his hands still; when it grows brittle they rub firmly, assuring her of his judgement-free presence. He's told her that she shouldn't hang on his judgement, and God knows she's told herself, but it's still important to her in a way that she doesn't understand, this need to be judged worthy by Steve Rogers. She wants to be trusted, and in some ways that's more terrifying than placing her trust in him.

It's stupid, but she doesn't really care. She's allowed to want things.

 

He paints her hands first. Stiletto blades on the backs of her hands, slim and silver, flexing with a wiggle of her nimble fingers right along the bones. They're small hands, delicate and beautiful, but deadlier than any knife for any number of reasons, not all of which are violent. A come-hither crook of these same nimble fingers has been the end of many a man (and more than one woman, as well).

 

Delicate lotus flowers adorn her feet. The color he's painted them with isn't found in nature, but it matches the glossy polish on her toes and calms her to look at, so he mixes it carefully. These feet have carried her through many miles of mud, metaphorically or otherwise, and like the lotus, she blooms regardless; thriving in the dirty places. 

 

She wants no spiders on her body. It's not a discussion. They're watching a documentary on some science channel while Steve organizes his paints and supplies, and at a brief mention of spiders, a close-up of their tiny fierce bodies on full display across the fifty inch television, Steve glances at her, eyebrow quirked and head tilted. He's thinking, but she shakes her head, and that's the end of that. Her body is not the Black Widow because she is her body and her body is her. It's taken her a long time to stop seeing them as separate entities. 

He instead paints a tiny, gossamer web across her face, lines so fine as to almost be invisible, paint shimmering from one angle and shadowing from another. The narrow brush feels strange on her face, tickling and soothing all at once, bristles soft as his touch and the strokes he lays across her. With each pass of the brush, her shoulders relax, and her barriers lower with them. She doesn't hold out much hope for dream-catchers on walls, but a dream-snaring web like armor feels just right.

She closes her eyes when the brush lightly skates under them, but as he tips her face up, she opens them again.

"How do I look?" she asks, voice flat but not without humor. Her hands slide along the sides of the chair that she grips.

"Fierce," he answers, brow creased in concentration. He looks up, mouth a crooked smile, just a gentle lilt. "And fiercely beautiful." He pauses. "You look bulletproof."

She thinks about kissing him, just leaning forward and touching her lips to his with no intent. She's wearing no lipstick and would leave no mark on him. But she likes what this is, this delicate thing suspended between them on iron cables. She likes it a lot.

And she feels bulletproof, with her warpaint and his stare.

Kissing him would probably just smear the paint.

There's nothing trapped in her web, just silver strands across her face, and that's the point. It's not really a trap at all.

 

Natasha is not an artist. She paints stick figures on each of Steve's shoulder blades and snorts quietly to herself; Steve needs someone to watch his back, after all, when she can't be there.

She paints numbers down his spine, hoping he will someday be able to put the past behind him, looking forward instead of back at the unreachable. He jokes that with his flexibility, any part of his body is reachable, but his eyes are soft and he's not hurt, not offended, by the thought process that led her there. 32557038 down each notch of his vertebrae; 1945 trails to his coccyx; 2 is for the number of hearts he feels he's left broken.

It would be so easy to draw his shield, pick a spot and paint a circle in blue, filled in with white and red, childlike and inexact, but that's not him, not really. He is much bigger than the symbol he carries or the symbol he wears: he is the shield, it encompasses all of him. 

She writes lyrics to songs she loves and songs that are stuck in her head, songs she's heard him humming and songs that make him pause and reflect sadly for a moment in time. These she paints in tiny letters, small as she can make them with a fine-point marker and mostly legible words. She fills in his throat and clavicle with these thoughts, the tops of his shoulders and the contour of his ribs, bright colors and bold colors and subdued colors, all of them necessary and beautiful, all of them complementing and balancing. It looks like it, anyway; what does she know about color technique in art? But she knows what she likes -- finally, she knows -- and that's enough for her, and it's enough for Steve, who trusts her with her hands at his throat, one on the back of his neck and rubbing gently, almost idly. His Adam's apple bobs as he swallows, making the brush jump in its slow drag, leaving an extra long question mark, and she can't help but chuckle at its appropriateness.

 

She feels guilty washing them off, like she's breaking something that's not hers and doesn't know why, but he tells her that she shouldn't worry. He sees them when he looks at her, her beauty and strength, her past and the future she's forging, her triumphs and loves and compassion. These are tattoos, he says, not makeup. They are etched down deep.

And he'll always paint them again, whenever she needs to see her true self written across her skin. Whenever it gets hard to find on her own, deep inside her. He can show her an honest mirror.

 

She asks him to paint one thing more. Сожалением, so that she can wash it away with the rest. This she feels no guilt over, as the red pours over her cupped palms into the basin; this she relinquishes freely.

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally somewhat longer and more ambitious, with a strong dose of Natasha's Red Room days told in her endless stories, but I gave up tinkering with this one and trimmed it down to the sappy parts because I wanted her to be happy. The Russian is shamelessly grabbed from Google translate so please correct me if it turns out that that's not "regret", which is what it's supposed to say, hopefully.


End file.
